The Western Digital WD Black SN750 SSD Review: Why Fix What Isn't Broken?

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

The WD Black SN750 is a few percent faster overall than last year's model, allowing it to tie with the Phison E12-based Corsair MP510 on the Light test. But the Samsung 970 EVO and Silicon Motion SM2262EN-based drives are still substantially faster, at least when the test is run on an empty drive.

The average and 99th percentile latency scores for the SN750 are a few microseconds faster than its predecessor, which doesn't change the drive's rankings. The average latency scores are pretty close to the fastest drives, but the 99th percentile latency scores are merely average for this product segment.

The average write latency scores from the SN750 are virtually tied with the fastest drives, and the average read latency scores are imperceptibly slower than the Samsung 970 EVO.

As with average write latency, 99th percentile write latency for the SN750 is basically tied with the fastest drives—every write lands in the SLC cache with minimal delay, even when the test is run on a full drive. The 99th percentile read latencies do not rank as highly, but are still comfortably below 1ms even for the full-drive test run.

As with the Heavy test, the new WD Black leapfrogs the Toshiba XG6 to retake our record for most energy efficient NVMe SSD on the Light test. There's still a bit of catching up to be done before it matches the WD Blue SATA SSD, but it's still quite an accomplishment for the SN750 to use half the energy required by the Samsung 970 EVO.